Vinyl and non-vinyl products can include a heterogeneous layer of colored particles or chips. Such flooring products are used in various facilities and applications where performance improvement comes from having the particles or chips extend throughout the thickness of the product. Such through-color flooring products can be formed to have relatively short-grained striated patterns. Through-color products are also used in ceilings, walls, table-tops, counter-tops, cabinets, or other suitable applications. Other layered flooring products are used where simulations of wood grains, marble, or other natural long-grained striated design patterns are achieved by printing the design patterns onto a thin film layer.
Known layered vinyl flooring products fabricated with a long-grained striated pattern suffer from a drawback of not having desired properties such as through-color and/or through-pattern. This results is an undesirable visual quality of the patterns due to wear over time.
The through-color flooring products suffer from a drawback of having relatively short-grained striated patterns that do not provide users with the desired long-grained simulations of naturally occurring flooring materials. The colored particles or chips used in producing such flooring tend to adhere to each other or settle in clumps when entering the intake of the feeding hopper. The colored particles or chips do not uniformly distribute upon discharge region from the hopper.
A materials handling system, a patterned product, and a process of fabricating such a patterned product that do not suffer from one or more of the above drawbacks would be desirable in the art.